Hiding Things from Yourself

We all know that you’re supposed to place geometry into groups or components as you create your SketchUp Model. This not only makes your model more functional, but also easier to navigate. Sometimes, however, it can make things challenging to edit. Imagine this: you double-click to enter a group, but now you can’t clearly see the geometry you need to edit because the rest of the model is out of the way. So what do you do?

You could move the group out of the model, off to the side, then hope you can get it back exactly where it was once you finish editing.

You could make a copy of a component, paste it off to the side and edit it, allowing the original component to assume the changes as you make them.

You could simply delete the rest of the model, make the changes you need to the selected group, then redraw everything once you’re done…

Or, you could watch this week’s Skill Builder to learn how to control the visibility of containers, making it easier to see what you’re doing when editing groups and components. Your call.

The ability to see only what you need is not a nice-to-have, but an essential skill!

When not supporting the sales team as a sales engineer, Aaron spends his free time designing things in SketchUp. That's it. That's all he does... oh, and he likes backpacking, skiing, drawing, painting, sculpting, and spending time with his family!